10 Tools That You Can Use To Help Reduce SaaS Churn

Churn is a scary topic for SaaS companies. Churn rate, also known as cancellation rate, is the percentage of customers who have canceled a product or service within a given time period. For example, if you had a 10% user churn rate, that means each month 10% of your customer base is canceling. Ideally, every SaaS company would reduce churn to 0%.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen and churn will occur. Thankfully there are a lot of tools out there that can help us reduce churn.

Churn Buster’s name is right. It’s a tool that will help you fight churn. Churn Buster’s air-tight, scalable process automatically solves payment problems in Stripe caused by insufficient funds, expiration dates, card re-issuing and etc. These are common problems that lead to SaaS churn. If your users are loving your product, there should be no reason why they will churn. Unfortunately, simple errors like these occur and that’s where Churn Buster can help you fix these problems.

Some of my favorite features about Churn Buster are the white label dunning emails, automatic subscription renewals, and their real time reporting (my personal fave). I’m a huge analytic guy and the reporting really helps me analyze my churn.

YesInsights is an all in one feedback platform for companies to take the guesswork out of knowing what their customers want through actionable feedbacks. One of the best ways to reduce churn is by actually talking to your customers and figuring out what features they want. Another proven way to reduce SaaS churn is to analyze what is wrong with your funnel and where the users are falling off or why they aren’t converting.

With YesInsights, you can create simple one-click and Net Promoter Score surveys in order to increase engagement and narrow down the main reason behind the churn. A good trick is to send consistent feedback surveys to all your active users and check in with them to see how they are enjoying your product.

You can also use one-click surveys to determine why the user churn after they’ve canceled their account with you. It’s a powerful tool that integrates with Zapier and most email service providers.

As mentioned above, a powerful way to reduce churn is by analyzing where the user is falling off the funnel. Enter YesInsights’ website widget! You can have a feedback widget appear on certain pages within your application to figure out why the majority of the users are getting stuck.

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Stunning is an amazing product that not a lot of people know about. But it’s one of the most powerful tools to reduce SaaS churn. It works very similar to Churn Buster that’s listed above.

You’ve worked hard to get customers, and you want to make sure that they stay customers. You don’t want to lose them due to failed payments and billing issues. But your app is singing sweet lullabies to get your attention. You know that you need dunning in your app (code that sends notifications over time when billing issues arise and allows customers to update their billing information), but the thought of figuring out what web hooks to listen for, how to respond to them, and making sure it’s all tested and stable is just not something that you want to deal with or worry about.

What if you didn’t have to worry about lost revenue due to expired cards and failed payments, and you didn’t have to write a single line of code to make that a reality? Stunning makes that possible.

Just like YesInsights, you can set up Stunning rather quickly without having to bother your developers. This is huge for a non-technical co-founder who wants to reduce SaaS churn. Another amazing feature with Stunning is the SMS notifications. Having multiple ways to contact your customers when payments fail is essential. Stunning lets you also send SMS notifications to your customers when payments fail. Links are included in the text that let them directly update their billing information. Don’t have cell numbers for your customers? They can even help you collect them.

LessChurn is a product created by my friend Allan Branch, who’s also the co-founder of LessEverything, Lessfilms, and LessAccounting. LessChurn is simple and straight forward with one goal in mind: to reduce churn by replacing the delete your account button with a simple survey.

I love this tool so much! You can’t write a list of tools that will help you reduce churn without including Intercom. There are so many features within Intercom that can help you reduce churn that it is worth a whole blog post itself. But you’ll just have to suffice a quick summary.

Intercom is a fundamentally new way for every team in an internet business to see and talk to customers, with products for live chat, marketing, feedback, and support.

One of the most powerful ways to reduce churn is by increasing user engagement. This can be done by sending educational materials over time, personally checking in with users, sending feedback surveys, showing you care, improving your overall product features etc.

Intercom makes this process super easy by allowing you to send triggered emails based on different segments. You can set custom segments and tags within Intercom to segment certain users and only send emails to those specific people. Everything in the email can be customized and personalized.

You can embed surveys with tools like YesInsights directly within Intercom and get up to 75%+ response rates due to the native triggered email. With Intercom, you can trigger drip emails throughout the user’s lifecycle as well as during their trial phase to ensure that the user is having zero trouble adapting to your product.

There’s too much to cover in a small section of what Intercom can do, but I would recommend that you check out their docs and blog for more ideas on how it can be used to reduce churn.

First Officer is a stripe monitoring tool that reports in depth metrics ranging from MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) to cohort analysis and churn.

Are new customers happier than the old ones?

The behavior of a small group isn’t visible in total churn, but it shows in monthly cohort charts.

MRR is the #1 SaaS metric and it isn’t just a single figure. To really conquer it — you must divide it as First Officer might say. With First Officer you can see the trends and compare performance between plans. View just one metric or compare them all in one place.

Their pricing is pretty straight forward. There is a hobby package for 29$/month that allows you to have up to 250 customers. This works pretty well with bootstrapping SaaS companies. You can then upgrade to the 79$/month package if you grow.

Who are your most valuable customers? You can argue that it is the one that is paying you the most money, but I think the most valuable customers are the ones that advocate and refer your product to others. A user is more likely to continue using your product if their friends are using the product as well.

Ambassador provides the most flexible, customizable experience for your referral and affiliate programs. Referral, partner, and affiliate channels can all be managed in a single dashboard via Ambassador. Ambassador works by allowing you to build campaigns and allowing others to refer your product.

You can then, reward Ambassadors for referrals with cash, points, virtual currencies or swag and receive actionable metrics to measure ROI. With Ambassador you can leverage the power of the social web to influence purchasing decisions. Use Social recommendations to increase sales and conversions.

Improving user onboarding is a great way to reduce churn and to keep your users educated. Appcues gives you the power to take user onboarding into your own hands. Build
measurable onboarding experiences without bugging your dev team.

New users often have different motivations for using your product. Get them to their first WOW experience faster by giving each person a unique experience. Appcues make it easy for you to add messages and call to action right within your application so you can save time and resources.

With Appcues, you can run user onboarding experiments and measure the results. Iterate and improve your onboarding strategy over time without bugging your developers. Again, I’m a huge fan of apps where I don’t need to bother my developers. If you couldn’t tell 🙂

Introduce your product with interactive tours. Train them on how to get the most out of each feature instead of letting them hash it out alone.

Another powerful thing about Appcues is all the apps that it integrates with other software such as Hubspot, Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, and many more.

Crazy Egg is an awesome tool created by Neil Patel and Hiten Shah. It’s one of my go-to tools for heatmaps. Heatmaps are important because it shows you what your users are clicking on. You’ll be surprised at the things that you can learn from using Crazy Egg.

For example, you can see the things that your customers are clicking on that they aren’t supposed to be. One of our blogging customers noticed that people were clicking on a picture of a food that she prepared. She later learned through surveying her audience that they were actually trying to share her photo with their friends. She set up a Pinterest sharing plugin within her WordPress blog to fix that issue.

We learned a lot about what our users are doing on YesInsights homepage by seeing how far users are scrolling down. We learned that we need to put a stronger call to action for our “Sign up” button in the middle of the landing page because users weren’t going all the way down.

With heatmaps, you can learn more about users are doing within your app. Let’s say you analyzed a bunch of data and noticed that people are stuck on a certain feature. You can look into that with heatmaps and then reach out personally to improve that feature’s UX to fix and reduce churn.

Revenue from existing customers is five to seven times less expensive! Yet too many businesses still lack the tools that enable their teams to get the insights they need to handle renewals successfully. Planhat does exactly that!

Planhat is a SaaS based Customer Success Platform that helps customer success managers to manage their renewals, reduce churn and grow their accounts.

Predict churn and spot upsell opportunities with a composite customer health score. The score is transparent and fully customizable. Add dimensions based on your CSMs subjective input or hard facts and data points.

Planhat’s Customer Success forecasting module helps CSMs to get visibility into the future. Forecast on a license level or fall back on Planhat’s crafty projection scenarios.

The forecasting analytics page gives you tremendous insights! It will put the forecasted future renewals in perspective of your historical performance. And it lets you drill down into any specific period to link your KPIs to, including renewals, upgrades, downgrades or churn of specific accounts.

There you have it! 10 tools that can help you reduce SaaS churn!

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John is the Marketing Lead at YesInsights. John is motivated by a desire to make other's lives easier, particularly through digital means. He is fascinated by seeing other businesses grow, and that's how John landed at YesInsights.

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Great list Wilson! If you do another pass, I’d love to have you consider adding Natero as well. It uses machine learning to predict churn and helps Customer Success teams manage their customer lifecycle. (www.natero.com)